Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  “Well, in our scene, Bette, as herself, calls me and tells me about the winner [Robert Hutton] and that what he wants is a date with me—Joan Leslie, movie star. She was required to do most of the talking, leaving me mainly with, ‘Oh, of course I’ll do it.’ Now, at the same time Bette was working on another film, one of her big starring vehicles in which she was, as always, totally absorbed, and she had quite a bit of dialogue in our little scene. So here she was, suddenly thrust onto this strange set, with a totally new crew. She blew her lines a few times. Finally, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, I just don’t think I can do this. I can’t play myself! If you give me a gun, a cigarette, a wig, I can play any old bag, but I can’t play myself!’

  “Everyone laughed. This broke the tension on the set and allowed the scene to proceed smoothly, as this super, sophisticated lady probably knew it would.”

  Director Delmer Daves and I talked about Bette on location in Connecticut in 1960, where Delmer was directing Parrish. Delmer, a ladies’ man par excellence who had had wild affairs with Kay Francis and other lovelies, remembered that Bette had a wandering eye for the many handsome servicemen who showed up at the canteen. “She had been widowed the year before, and it was a very lonely, sad time for Bette,” he remembered. “And some of those kids were prize specimens, real catnip for the gals. I’m not saying she disappeared with any of them, but I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. She was in a real tense, uptight mood at times, and some romantic quickies might have filled the bill for her, might have calmed her down.”

  But according to actor Jack Carson, who appeared in Hollywood Canteen, Davis did get “calmed down,” and with her fair share of romantic quickies, culled from the embarrassment of masculine riches pouring into the canteen from all branches of the service. As Jack recalled to me on the set of The Bramble Bush in 1959, Bette took a special liking to slim but well-muscled young sailors sporting the then regulation thirteen buttons up, down, and across the flies of World War II legend.

  “There were some real lookers there at the canteen out to make the service kids happy,” Jack laughed, “knockouts like Dolores Moran and Julie Bishop and Dorothy Malone. But Bette was the one they clustered around. As I remember, she was in one of her heavy costume pictures then [The Corn is Green] and she would jump out of costume and race from Warners down to the canteen and when she showed up she’d look like something the cat dragged in—hair unkempt, makeup still partly smeared over her face, and with any old thing thrown on, and those guys would drop whatever cutie-pie starlet they had on hand and would make a beeline for her. Within two minutes of showing up, she’d be mobbed by them.”

  Jack recalled asking one brawny marine what there was about Bette that got them all so turned on. “I hear she screws like a mink,” he leered. “I thought that an ungentlemanly remark considering how Bette was knocking herself out night after night for those guys—she’d wash dishes, serve food, do anything and everything—and I was about to call the loudmouth son of a bitch on it, and then it struck me, ‘Well ain’t it the truth?’”

  Jack remembered that there was much laughter among the girls handling the fan mail when more than a few letters came in from guys who had been shipped to the Pacific and wrote, in highly individual, none-too-grammatical, and often misspelled words, how they could never forget the exciting, fulfilling, “wowie” hours Bette had given them.

  But as always she continued to be in love with love. Sex was a consolation, but love, her undoing, continued to be a racking need. During the nightly peregrinations and prowlings at the Hollywood Canteen, she had met only one serviceman who aroused her deeper vulnerabilities. He was a ruggedly handsome army corporal named Lewis A. Riley. Riley, some years younger than herself, told her he had seen every movie she had ever made and that she was his goddess. Soon Riley alone was making public appearances with her—no backstairs quickies this time around. As thrilled as a kid with the biggest ice cream sundae in the world, he preened and puffed out his chest when Davis took him to fancy Hollywood places like La Rue and Chasen’s. They were photographed, and the pictures appeared in the daily papers and the fan magazines. In short, they were an item.

  “He’s a nobody, Bette,” Ann Warner told her. “You are a famous woman. Why throw yourself away on a good-looking set of muscles in khaki?” Soon she had the good-looking set of muscles in bed, and then she was in love with him.

  When Riley was transferred clear across the country to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was assigned to the 168th Signal Company, Photo Division, of the Second Army, Davis decided that some camp following would be in order. With Mr. Skeffington and Hollywood Canteen finished, there was nothing to keep her, for a month or so anyway, in Hollywood. Jack Warner, who reportedly had engineered Riley’s transfer east to get rid of him, didn’t want to give her time off, but Davis gave him one of her ultimatums and off she went to Georgia.

  She took a rented house in Phoenix City, Alabama, just across the border from Columbus, Georgia, Fort Benning, and her corporal. The amorous corporal continued his corporeal activities whenever he could get away from his duties. Davis had her sister Bobby along as a coverup. Bobby’s emotional health had improved; she was even feeling chipper. Davis and Riley kept her even more so by arranging dates with the sexiest servicemen that Fort Benning could provide.

  While in Alabama, Davis got a chance to meet her idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt. She had often crossed swords in his defense with the more conservative Hollywood residents who hated his liberal reforms and his determination to put the government to work helping the less privileged. Now, in 1944, he was leading a world war to its successful conclusion. She wrote asking to meet him in Washington, and then found herself standing in line at a public tea. Shocked to find one of the most famous women in the country willing to shake his hand under such plebeian circumstances, he asked her to come to his house in Warm Springs for an evening of dinner and socializing. Since Warm Springs, Georgia, was fairly near Fort Benning and her corporal, Davis arranged to go there. She always recalled the wonderful evening she spent with the president.

  Shortly thereafter (Jack Warner pulling strings again?), Corporal Lewis A. Riley of the Second Army found himself transferred overseas. This jarred Davis mightily, for not only had the corporal been a fantastic lover, but his boyish adoration had refreshed and renewed the healthier aspects of her self-image. Before he left, Riley asked her to wait for him. Davis decided she wanted to marry him immediately but he surprised her by hesitating. Then he told her he would rather wait until the war was over.

  Later she said, “I grew tired of living my life in a mailbox.” Soon she was back to work, and the distant Corporal Riley seemed a dream indeed.

  Back in Hollywood, Davis went to a party at Laguna Beach. Her mother had a house there—one that Davis reluctantly paid for—and her uncle Paul Favor and his family lived nearby.

  At the party a lean, craggy, muscular man handed her a drink. He didn’t leave her side for the rest of the evening. He was William Grant Sherry. An ex-marine, he was just out of a service hospital for a condition about which he was reluctant to talk. He had been an unsuccessful boxer and was an avid painter whose enthusiasm far exceeded his talent.

  Soon he was coming on strong and turned into the most persistent wooer Davis had yet encountered. Intense, but outwardly composed, he had a deep inner fierceness and bitterness which flashed out of his dark eyes more frequently than not. Miffed with the reluctant corporal, feeling uptight and lonely, carried away by Sherry’s evident masculinity, she let herself be sucked into a relationship. Ruthie didn’t approve of Sherry. She told Davis he was déclassé. His father had been a carpenter with the Theatre Guild; his mother worked an elevator in a San Diego hotel. Davis was tempted to tell Ruthie that Sherry’s mother showed more self-respect than she did; at least she didn’t sit back and let her children support her!

  Ruthie was horrified further when Sherry took up physiotherapy to earn more money. His paintings weren’t selling well. He was in awe
of Davis, or pretended to be, but this was no boy-scout corporal worshipping at a goddess’s shrine. Bobby, suspicious of him, had Sherry investigated. Pulling himself up by his bootstraps Horatio Alger–style was not for Sherry-boy. Bobby kept insisting that Sherry was not sincere. Then Ruthie hired a detective and came up with more dirt about Sherry. Davis refused to read the reports. She said later that the more Ruthie fought the Sherry involvement, the higher she got on him. He asked her to marry him. She agreed. Ruthie raised the roof. “You’ll regret it,” she said. “Why, Bette, why?” Davis replied succinctly, “He’s damn good in bed—that’s why!” Out she sailed from her mother’s bedroom with the plaintive wail ringing in her ears, “But Bette, you don’t have to marry him for that!”

  They were married on November 29, 1945, at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. Both families were represented. Ruthie took many pictures.

  In August 1946, Davis became pregnant, though the doctors warned her that at her age, thirty-eight, the going might be rough. Nevertheless, she was anxious to be a mother and willing to take her chances.

  Another of Davis’s famous feminine rivals and would-be lovers surfaced at this time. Joan Crawford had signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1943 after her five-year deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had ended. She had known she was washed up at the Lion Studio. “They laughed when I told them I wanted to do pictures like Madame Curie and Random Harvest,” she later said of her final days at MGM. “They still saw me as the superficial clotheshorse and the ragged shopgirl on the make for riches.” Joan had made a few quality pictures—The Women, Susan and God, A Woman’s Face—and then found herself relegated to inferior stories while the big buildup went to Mayer’s new favorite, Greer Garson. Greta Garbo had made her last film in 1941. Norma Shearer terminated her six-picture agreement in 1942. The last of MGM’s original Big Three women stars to go, Crawford left the studio with a heavy heart. “Mr. Mayer didn’t want me to go, but he saw how unhappy I was,” she recalled. “I wasn’t being taken seriously, I felt neglected and old-hat, something exploited as a certain commodity, then discarded.”

  By 1944, forty years old on March 23, Crawford was definitely running scared. That year she made a brief appearance in the all-star Hollywood Canteen, then ruminated and agonized over the choice of vehicle that would get her off to a smash start at Warners. “What does the woman want?” Jack Warner asked his aides. “Good roles in good pictures!” she relayed back.

  Finally producer Jerry Wald found Mildred Pierce for her. It was another rags-to-riches story but with a difference. Obsessed with nurturing and protecting her spoiled daughter, Mildred leaves her also-ran husband to start a restaurant, fights her way to wealth and success, her only objective being to give her girl a better life. But the girl (Ann Blyth) is rotten clean through and murders Mildred’s playboy second husband (Zachary Scott) when he rejects her advances. For a time, Mildred takes the blame. And so forth and so on. Based on a lurid James M. Cain novel, the doings were wildly melodramatic, and yet director Michael Curtiz made something strong and realistic out of it that elicited heavy audience identification. “He took off my MGM shoulder pads and rubbed me down to some hardpan character,” Crawford said of Curtiz. She seems to have gotten along far better with the feisty little director than Davis ever did, probably because she flattered him by going along with his ideas and because the hard-bitten Curtiz somehow sympathized with Joan’s onward-and-upward struggle for success.

  Mildred Pierce won Crawford an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1945, and this immediately launched her into top stardom at Warners, where within two years she had two other prestige smashes, Humoresque (she was the dissolute, filthy-rich mistress-patroness of violinist John Garfield) and Possessed (in which she gave Davis a run for her money in the unrequited-love tournaments as an unstable woman driven literally mad and murderous by the scornful and contemptuous Van Heflin’s rejection).

  She had by this time, of course, become Bette Davis’s chief rival at the Burbank studio. If Davis were the Fourth Warner Brother, the triumphant and ever-more-ambitious Crawford had become Warner Brother Number Five—or even Bette the Second. There were rumors that Jack Warner had brought in Crawford deliberately to humble Davis and make her less cocky. Davis, though her dressing room was near Crawford’s, went out of her way to avoid her. Not so the persistent Joan, who sent her flowers, perfume, notes—all of which were either ignored or politely but firmly returned.

  At first, Davis was puzzled over Crawford’s neurotically intense pursuit of her. Her first theory, as she later told a friend, was that Crawford was trying to assure her there were no hard feelings over Davis’s brief affair with her Dangerous co-star Franchot Tone, Mr. Crawford Number Two, in 1935. Or Joan might be as embarrassed about the constant feud rumors as she, and wanted to be friendly. Her third theory, at first unthinkable, unimaginable, finally hit Davis like an electric shock, but everything pointed to its validity: Damn, the woman was attracted to her! Repelled because she had not the slightest interest in nor intention of reciprocating, yet fascinated because it built her overweening ego, Davis continued to be elusive, distant, cursorily polite when they passed each other in the hall or between sound stages. Crawford seethed at the implied rebuke. With an ego that was every bit as monstrous as Davis’s, though filtered through a different personality and mystique, Crawford brooded—and proceeded to bide her time.

  Joan Crawford’s lesbian tendencies were, of course, no secret to Hollywood insiders. There had been rumors, back in the 1920s, of her crushes on such lovelies as Anita Page, Dorothy Sebastian, and Gwen Lee, her early MGM colleagues. She had been, by the standards of the time, reasonably secretive and discreet, and since her attraction to men equaled her passion for women, many in Hollywood, and the public at large, would have found fantastic such predilections in Joan (her standard ad copy, as in the 1947 Daisy Kenyon, ran along such lines as “Joan’s Having Man Trouble Again!”) And indeed she was—offscreen as well as on. She had had a flaming affair with Clark Gable while still married to her first husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Davis, who had made one picture with Doug, Jr., and sensed his unhappiness and humiliation over the Gable affair during the shooting, had heard plenty of scuttlebutt about that and considered Joan as of 1933 a pretty reckless trifler with the moral-turpitude contract clauses.

  Joan, Bette, and Franchot Tone had formed, in 1935, that brief triangle during the making of Dangerous, and after that their paths had seldom crossed and then only superficially. Davis had known of Tone’s infidelity, the beatings he had given Crawford, and their less than amicable 1938 divorce. After some years of finding consolation (discreetly) with a few women and (blatantly) with Hollywood’s studs around town, Crawford had married handsome but dull Phillip Terry, a scholarly, homebody type (for an actor), whom she divorced in 1945 after a boring three-year marriage.

  In addition to her straight and gay involvements, Joan had taken on additional emotional overload by adopting several children. Helen Hayes, who knew Joan well, later said, “Joan tried to be all things to all people—I just wish she hadn’t tried to be a mother!” Truer words were never spoken, for Joan proceeded to abuse hapless daughter Christina and rebellious son Christopher so erratically and so sadistically, often when drunk, that many years later she was to reap a posthumous whirlwind of ridicule as Christina’s Mommie Dearest blockbuster set loose bizarre stories involving wire coathangers and other weird forms of discipline.

  This, then, was the woman who in 1945–1947 was rivaling Davis at Warners and lusting after her into the bargain. Adela Rogers St. Johns told me in 1960 (in a completely innocent context on Adela’s part) that Joan had often rhapsodized to her about Bette’s fire and excitement and “beautiful fierceness.”

  Confronted at last with the true nature of Crawford’s neurotic and persistent overtures, Davis made herself as distant and unavailable to her overwrought Warner colleague as she could.

  Crawford was deeply hurt when Davis refused her friendship.
She talked of Bette often and compulsively. She seemed to want to take on some of Davis’s feistiness and brazenness, her do-or-die, courageous, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-might approach to her objectives. For Joan, in her own way, was a tough cookie too. She could not have attained and held her major position in films for so long if she hadn’t been. But in many ways she was more vulnerable than Bette, less self-confident, more emotional. She was bedeviled by her feeling that she had more personality than true talent. She envied Bette her unquestioned gifts.

  Bette’s basic attitude was that Joan was unstable, untrustworthy, insecure, and unreliable, in friendship and career. She made Davis ornery and nervous and tense. She told her associates that Crawford in her view was a phony and a hypocrite. “There’s no way of telling in what direction that Crawford cat will jump!” she said.

  Throughout 1947 Davis had fretted, during and after the pregnancy with her daughter B.D. that kept her inactive, over Crawford’s rapid ascendancy at Warners. She asked for prints of Humoresque and Possessed, for which Crawford had won critical kudos, and studied them several times. “What an ambitious bitch!” she would scream to Sherry, who enjoyed watching her squirm as Crawford’s face filled the screen. “But brother, she’ll have to go some to put me out of business!” The Davis and Crawford paths were to cross again—and again—in the years to come, usually tensely, never pleasantly.

  While enjoying herself at the canteen, Davis had gone into production with The Corn Is Green in the role of the selfless Welsh school-teacher that Ethel Barrymore had made her own and which she played to great theatrical acclaim for several years on Broadway and on tour.